Highlights from Google I/O 2013

Yesterday Android developers from around the world converged in San Francisco for the annual Google I/O conference. In an odd twist of scheduling, Google decided to knock all the keynotes out of the way at once, delivering one 4-hour long keynote. While it wasn’t quite as sensational as the skydiving stunt of 2012, the 2013 keynote contained a few announcements developers may find interesting. We’ve been on the ground at the conference and wanted to share some highlights:

Brand New IDE for Android Developers

Google announced that Eclipse will soon be replaced with Android Studio, a new IDE that intends to speed up and simply the app building process.

Beta Testing and Staged Rollouts

Developers will now be able to push updates to a percentage of users for Alpha testing purposes, before rolling it out to all users.

Google Play Music All Access

Google announced a new subscription-based music service with some snazzy features such as custom radio stations and the ability to curate intelligent playlists. Similarly to Spotify, users will be able to pay a monthly fee for unlimited access to a giant catalog of music.

All-New Google Hangouts Messaging Service

Google announced a new “Hangouts” app for Android, iOS and Chrome today. The new app replaces other pre-existing Google messaging services in an attempt to unify messaging independently of which service you’re using.

Google+ Gets a Makeover

Google announced over 40 new features for Google+ today, the most notable being a redesigned multicolumn stream and big improvements to G+ photos.

These are just a few of the more juicy announcements, for the whole scoop watch the entire keynote: